In defense of a multidimensional approach to sexual identity

The papers in Bisexual and Homosexual Identities assert that standard notions of sexual identity are inadequate. Their criticisms rest on unarticulated views about the nature of science, which constitute positions in the Verstehen controversies. It is argued that social constructionist conceptualizations of sexual identity, which these papers propose as an alternative to earlier ones, are unidimensional and thus inadequate. Despite its limitations, Shively and De Cecco's (1977) model for components of sexual identity, if augmented by ideas of (1) psychobiologically mediated arousal cue-responses and (2) self-concepts, provides a more comprehensive and potentially richer conceptualization of sexual identity than social constructionist theories.